Executing Dissent: Sovereignty, Spectacle, and Repression in Iran, 2020-2026

نویسنده: رضا عاشوری

Abstract This article examines the intensification of state executions against Iranian protesters from 2020 to 2026, culminating in the highest annual execution total since 1989 amid the December 2025 uprising and war with the United States and Israel. Rather than treating sovereignty, judicial interpretation, structural violence, performative punishment, and securitization as five co-equal traditions, it consolidates analysis around one lens: a sovereignty-and-jurisgenesis account combining Nasiri’s (2025) clerical sovereignty, Nasiri and Faghfouri Azar’s (2024) law-constituting state violence, and Cover’s (1986) judicial interpretation as violence. This lens explains how Iran’s legal architecture manufactures killable subjects rather than merely suspending law during crisis. Galtung’s structural violence, Foucault’s confession and spectacle, and securitization theory serve as supporting layers specifying how this architecture operates. Situating this within comparative and historical scholarship on Iranian capital punishment, the article traces a case sequence from Navid Afkari through the Alikhani Square defendants alongside five years of execution statistics. It argues the shif…

capital punishment · jurisgenesis · sovereignty · spectacle

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